Pillar Two: Recruit for National Influence

I dream of the impact [our students] could make on people and on the history of ideas. I dream of those who go into other professions, who will bring Christian perspectives to bear throughout the disciplines, and in law and business and medicine and throughout our society.

-- Arthur Holmes[i]

HBU’s outstanding alumni are the product of this university’s nearly five decades of service. We want to build on that legacy creatively and aggressively. During the next decade, HBU intends to take its place among the finest Christian universities in the United States by attracting a student body that is both large[ii] and selective. In short, we want to build on our tradition of sending out well-educated students from our campus by attracting top freshmen from all over the country. We will transition from recruiting primarily in Houston and in Texas to aiming for students from every state. The best way to describe this new strategy is to say that we plan to become a top educational destination for students from families around the nation interested in a distinctively Christian university learning experience. At the same time, however, we will continue our policy of being open to students of all faiths. We are a Christian university with a Christian faculty and staff, but our policy is to be open to all with the desire and the merit to study with us.

While it is important to recruit nationally and to showcase our university to people across the United States and in other countries, we must empower our recruiting effort with scholarships. To say we want the finest Christian college students in America does not mean we simply want those who can afford to pay their tuition. HBU plans to develop a far larger endowed scholarship fund in order to make our university available to young people of achievement and aspiration, regardless as much as possible of their ability to pay.

In addition to building our scholarship fund, we are substantially bolstering our educational offerings. HBU will open a new Honors College, which will feature a curriculum based on reading from the great texts of human achievement. The new Honors College and the growing rigor of our Christian liberal arts core will allow us to produce even more students who have a high likelihood of getting their first choice admission to graduate schools, law schools, and medical schools and then thriving in those competitive environments.

Finally, when we combine national recruiting with more scholarship dollars and our new educational offerings, HBU will begin to produce a series of Rhodes, Fulbright, and Truman scholars. Houston will become a capital of Christian academic influence with a legacy that extends around the globe.

[i] From the edited book God and the Philosophers, Oxford University Press, 1996.

[ii] The Campus Master Plan completed by Doug Kozma and associates at JJR in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has concluded that HBU has acreage sufficient to sustain 7,000 undergraduates, with 70% of them living on campus, and graduate and professional schools of at least 3,000 students.